Beautiful Mistakes

What were we doing when the question of "mistake" came up? I think we were working in the yard and admiring the newly sprouted life in the few green oases scattered around the pebble-covered garden. Martin was explaining how a funny flower in one of these green spots saw the light of day entirely as a mistake: the seed that happened to be inside a pot his mother gave him somehow got hold of the soil and grew happily oblivious of its accidental, "mistaken" origins.

But then, you could say this for the entire life. It's just a mistake. That took root.

I am choosing to understand "mistake" as a "lucky coincidence" because this is how I like to think about it. Here's an example. Ever since I got the simple, plastic bird-feeder and hung it on the branch of a tree in the yard, the local sparrows, starlings, and a couple of unidentified bird visitors hang out in front of my window, inventing ever more acrobatic ways of getting to the food inside the feeder. Some days ago I decided to record the event, waited patiently with my little camera, stealthily approached the window as much as possible while the birds were busy fluttering around the cage, hardly breathed trying to stay invisible, and shot a brief video. The next day I transfered it to the computer, and while I was watching it, I realized that it had a completely unplanned-for background music to it, which I wasn't aware of while shooting the video. As it happened, Martin was practicing upstairs and some of his notes wafted from behind the closed door and down the stairs, infiltrating the moment which I thought was reserved for the birds in my lens, expanding its seemingly controlled parameters into a completely new universe. And what was created was a mini world of 19 seconds, full of incidents. Full of "mistakes."

Today I found out that a friend died. I am dedicating this small written record to the "mistake" which had brought us together, and which is called Emily Dickinson, or Philip Larkin -- depending on how you look at it. In the winter of 1999, I changed the topic of my Ph.D. thesis proposal from the poetry of Miss Dickinson to that of Mr. Larkin, and that's how Terry walked through the door of my life (to supervise this "mistake"), with a good-natured moustache, a hearty chuckle, and a healthy scepticism towards all things pretentiously academic. What good laughs we had, together with Larkin, over the folly of mankind. What deep thoughts we thought, glimpsing, through Larkin, at occasional moments of beauty and grace (mistakes in the overall madness?).

There aren't any mistakes, really. Only "a unique endeavour/To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower/Of being here" (Philip Larkin, "The Old Fools").

Under One Umbrella

It was one of our last days in New York, when we had already got used to the rats presiding in their subway empire. In fact, you can recognize a new-comer by a genuine look of horror and disbelief upon the encounter with the infamous rodents in such a public and widely-used place as the subway. At first you're shocked, the words "plague," "epidemic," and "black death" blur your vision, and you wonder (with a sort of an arrogant disgust) how on earth New Yorkers can share their daily space with these pests. Then you just accept it, like everybody else. You even begin to observe the little buggers with a certain curiosity as you wait for the train -- how unafraid they are, how they sniff at everything, how they sometimes look up at the platform as if they were contemplating a high jump without a pole. And you inevitably wonder at their skill to sense the approach of a bright metalic train early enough to scamper away into the safer, wider areas of the tracks.

We were waiting a little longer than usual, and a sizeable bunch of people had accumulated. To the left, a kid of about 10 or 11 was waiting with his father and sister. He was mildly restless from the wait (and perhaps that sweet pit-of-the-stomach feeling of anticipation before going into town), but then he noticed a small family of rats which made a slow entrance from the darkness of the tunnel, and he grew positively hyper. "Dad, dad, look at those rats, look at them!" he was yelling, pulling at his father's sleeve, and jumping up and down. A middle-aged man in a suit to our right began politely saying something about the phenomenon of rats in the subway, to everyone in general, by way of a little divertimento as we all waited. The rats were gingerly investigating the scattered pieces of trash, completely ignoring the humans towering above, with an air of a serious survival mission about them. The hyper-kid on the left was running short distances left and right, getting more and more excited, "When is the train coming? Dad, I wanna see one squashed!" (He got half of his wish the following day, although I don't know if he saw what I happened to see: the rat had been dead for a while -- it was dusty and really pancaked to the track, some of its blood having dried and crusted over the remnants of the fur). I half-turned around to take in the entire scene, and my glance met the smiling good-natured eyes of an elderly woman. There was something in her face, a half-apologetic, half-forgiving glitter in her look, that enveloped us all -- the moment, the rats, the waiters -- and for a second, as finally the screeching and clanging of the bustling train invaded the station from the other end, sending the rats scurrying in the opposite direction, we were all strangely and briefly connected, like dots strung into a drawing with a line, parts of the same nameless pantomime.

My other New York moment of the similar magnitude was premeditated. I constructed it successfully a few days before the trip, while we were getting ready -- which, among other things, meant borrowing seven different kinds of guides and travel books from the library, and following meticulously the weather forecast. So, knowing that the Friday after our arrival would be a torrentially wet day, I packed my mother's small, flower-patterned, folding umbrella (probably bought in one of those new Chinese shops that sprang like mushrooms after the rain in our neighboorhood). When, after a relaxed concert at the Small's club, we emerged onto the wet rain-beaten streets of Greenwich, I pulled the umbrella out triumphantly and excitedly. Huddled under its protective arch resonating with raindrops, we spent a few wonderful, rain-scented minutes walking with my mother, free and light as the rain, defying and neglecting all laws of physics.

I have always known that a simple thought, or an even simpler object can connect or conjure people up, even when it seems impossible. And I am glad for it.

An Afternoon with a Flower

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it"
e.e.cummings

Two Fridays ago I carried a flower the entire afternoon. I carried it first in my hair, then in my hand, and finally in Martin's pocket. It was a guest, a friend, a companion, a silent witness -- and it was dying.

What happened was that Central Park was simply breathing with full lungs after a torrential April shower, and all the mauve and pink and purple colours were sharpened and refreshed, and we were walking across it, on our way to the Museum of Natural History. In one little nook, next to a lake, a few workmen were doing some construction work. One was driving a small bob-cat-type of vehicle, and while talking and yelling out to the others, he rammed the top part of the car into the lower branches of a tree, hovering in a cloud of baby-white-and-pink blossoms. They spilled like a waterfall, and covered the men, the car, and the ground, the branch swaying helplessly over it. Trying to manoeuvre away from the tree, the driver hit it once again, provoking another pink snowfall, which earned him some serious teasing from his colleagues. As we passed by them, we were stepping on the lovely flowers, and I picked up one small bunch, that had flowered from the same bud, and stuck together. I wasn't sure what to do with it -- it was still so fresh, and wet from the rain, and perfect; it seemed unaware that very soon it will begin to wilt, and shrivel, and crumble. At that moment we reached Central Park West, and the Museum loomed up, towering over us and the flower. And so it somehow became quite clear what needed to be done. We stuffed all our belongings into the backpack, Martin hooked the flower into my hairclip, and off we went.

We admired the wild animals of all the zones, strolled respectfully among the herd of dinosaurs reduced to rib-cages (it was like watching a mighty opponent who lost in a combat), studied carefully the simulation of the mountain-making processes, and tried to resist touching the sparkling, veined slabs of all kinds of rocks -- but most importantly, we went to the Big Bang theatre. Here, you really get to see it all, and from the beginning (the beginning of our beginning, in any case). The flower was now visibly wilting and getting loose in the hairclip, so I took it into my hand, and we walked together down the spiral line of many billion years, reading about the explosions, the gases, the gravity, the quasars, the stars, the planets, the meteorites (pieces of which we looked at through glass), and towards the end of the line, the earth, this earth we were walking on, after a succession of species and creatures filed through it one after the other, our earth. At the hairwidth of space at the end of the line, we were looking at ourselves, like in a mirror, the offspring of all that spacedust.

The flower was in a bad shape. It was getting sticky and warm, so I deposited it into Martin's jacket pocket. Late that night, we left what remained of it on the terrace of the 47th floor of our building, overlooking Manhattan, and just catching a glimpse on the right of the green tufts of the Park. And I felt like Faulkner's Benji bellowing over a broken flower; and I wished I had a Luster to fix it half-angrily with a splint...

Знаци поред пута/ Signs by the road

Amtrak trains were a letdown. Not a big one, not the end of some candy-paper-wrapped illusion, no, nothing like that. But in my humble opinion they can't really be compared to Via Rail's long-distance trains. They are more cramped, they don't offer the skydome car, and, worst of all, they are pervaded by this slightly nauseating sweet-wet odour of public-place urine.

The scenery wasn't much more promising. After the initial excitement of saluting silently my favourite landmarks in Montreal (Farine Five Roses being the all-time winner), I had to settle for the rather drab early-spring-in-the-northern-latitudes type of landscape. The more we headed south, the dirtier, the more dislocated, and the more neglected places looked. At the Canadian-American border (just short of Plattsburg), the train stopped and remained motionless for over an hour, as a few of us lucky ones with the unconventional passports had to file into the restaurant car, answer additional questions, fill out an extra form, and pay $6 (I suppose for these additional administrative procedures). An older big man with a green passport (maybe Egyptian?) had to have his fingerprints taken, to boot. When we were jerked back into the steady plodding rhythm of the train, we were a little worse for the wear, but now finally ready to see the marvels of this new world, announced by the snowy tip of the Adirondack mountains hazy in the distance. Instead, the tracks winding along the banks of the Champlain Lake revealed half-submerged electric poles sadly leaning forward in the shallows of the lake; a little further on, an entire grove of some trees I didn't recognize was drowning in what looked like the flooded area. The terrain assumed a sudden inclination down into the lake, and the train slowed down noticeably, especially as we passed by the rust-eaten carcass of an abandoned train wagon, its nose almost dipped into the water at an unpleasant angle.

And then, a little further on, as the lake stayed behind and to the left, I saw it. In the middle of this industrial anonymous greyness interspersed with metallic-coloured heavy-duty trucks and occasional sickly naked-looking bushes, it stood its ground, unintrusively but with a smile. As in a dream, while through some fortuitous circumstance the train moved in slow-motion, I looked, mesmerized, at a young leafless tree (more like a bunch of overgrown shoots) by the railroad, decked abundantly with Christmas decorations. The red and white balls hung like strange fruit from its slender branches -- a whiff of magic nestling gratuitously in wilderness. The train was picking up speed, I craned my neck, glued my face to the window, and kept it in sight as long as I could, smiling back.

The most beautiful thing about this is that someone did it. Someone, some day, for some reason, or no reason, brought a bag of decorations and chose that scrawny little bush and placed the balls all over it, waving silent hello's to the passing trains.

What else could you ever hope for but such a small kindness on any old day?